Bust A Move
Rebuilding a Beautiful, Vacant Historic Detroit Home (Episode 51)
Painting An Architectural Mural
Our biggest project these past few weeks outside of yard work have been the decorating of our third floor space and redecoration of our master bedroom. After moving our old bedroom furniture up to the third floor and we were waiting on our new bed and furniture, I decided to take on the task of planning a wall mural behind our bed.
I settled on an architectural drawing of the Fisher Building downtown and used Photoshop with an image of our bed to plan the rough scale of the image I wanted to do.
Using a projector borrowed from a coworker, I took the image and projected it 1/2 at a time onto the wall behind our bed. Using a slightly darker shade of our wall color, I traced with a paintbrush on top of the projected lines and worked my way top to bottom and left to right to fill in the entire image. This was both difficult as well as an easy thing to do. The projected lines meant that it was hard to actually see what I was painting under the contrast of the light, but it was also fairly mindless work that, while meticulous, didn’t require a ton of brain power outside of making sure my projection lined up correctly.
Crate & Barrel Gwen Bed
Our bed arrived the next morning from Crate & Barrel. We purchased the queen size Gwen Bed and it is truly a beautiful piece of furniture that so far we are both very happy with. It looks great against the wall and is a fantastic mix of contemporary and mid century.
If you’re interested in buying furniture from Crate & Barrel, I recommend going online to eBay and purchasing a “new homebuyer” coupon online. It is a 15% coupon that they give to new home buyers in the mail, and you can purchase one from eBay for about $4 or so. It gave us a nice discount off the bed and that way we don’t have to wait for their annual furniture sale which is the same 15% discount anyhow!
Joybird Owen
We did not however like the “matching” Crate and Barrel nightstands and other furniture pieces, so we opted to look elsewhere. After looking around online, we settled on the Joybird Owen Series nightstands and console. We had heard of Joybird but didn’t know anyone who had ordered from them previously so we decided to give it a go!
The pieces are solid wood, which is a nice step up from Ikea. Overall the pieces are very attractive and well made, with a few areas where I noticed quality could improve. The drawer slides on the nightstands aren’t the best quality in that the drawers can be difficult to close reliably and smoothly, not terrible, but definitely frustrating, and one nightstand closes better than the other, which frustrates you to no end. The other problem we had out of the box was one of the drawer handles came out of the box broken, and communicating with Joybird’s customer service while “responsive” wasn’t good at communicating expectations on when to expect a resolution. We received a replacement handle in the mail about a month later, though.
Womb Chair
In moving our bedroom furniture upstairs to the third floor, we also moved our grey love seat up to our bedroom and this meant we needed a piece for the piano room. I really wanted a Saarinen Knoll Womb Chair and given their extreme price, decided to opt for a nice replica from Rove Concepts.
So far I am pleased with the quality and construction of this chair and really like the way it looks in the room. Long term we plan on moving our record player into the piano room and placing a bookcase in the corner to hold records on. I think it will be a much better use of the space than we had previously, and the extra light in this room will make it much easier to see our record collection and highlight the player.
Third Floor Shenanigans
Moving on up, we’ve been hard at work and slowly putting our 3rd floor space together. In our small nursery room we placed Brandon’s childhood trundle bed and a dresser from his grandparents home. It’s the perfect size for the bedroom and feels so cozy and cute. I bought new bedding for the trundle and main bed and added a floor sample nightstand and rug from West Elm that I got for cheap to finish the room off. We are making sure to use the picture rail we still have on the 3rd floor as much as possible and I think it looks quite nice all together!
The main 3rd floor bedroom is where we moved our master bedroom furniture and it really looks great in the space. The height of the headboard though meant I was going to have trouble again with deciding on what to do for artwork in the room and I think I finally found a good direction/solution.
We had many different automotive brochures that we found in the attic, all from 1964, and I have struggled for some time in finding a clever way to display them. After looking at collage inspiration online I decided to use these metal mesh wall panels and some mini black clothespins. I thought would look nice and well as giving me freedom to organize the brochures in a unique way. Overall, I am pleased with how these turned out, and so I am pursuing putting up more automotive design artwork on the 3rd floor as an overall theme.
We still have lots of work to do on the third floor and lots more decorating. I have ordered lots of things like lamps, rugs, and tables, and am still thinking through art, amenities, and other details our room will need for hosting guests!
Furniture in the Sunroom
After bringing back my great grandmother’s caned couch from Iowa, We feel much happier about the layout and design of our sunroom. It’s a nice comfortable place to sit now with a vintage card table as well to eat or work at. We have been spending more and more time in this room as a result and our Airbnb guests seem to love it too!
Painting
Our old friend Jeff Mueller has officially returned and is just getting started with our exterior paint. We are super happy to have him back and I look forward to sharing those progress images with you soon!
Our journey isn’t over
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